Phil Libin’s guest post on TechCrunch is an eye-opener. The day the Mac App Store launched, the Mac leapt from bringing in about three per cent of new Evernote users to 52 per cent, and although this figure slid over the following days, it’s still high.

Libin thinks this proves desktop software remains viable, but that user experience is key, as is discoverability. One thing Apple got very right with iOS was in placing the App Store front and centre and encouraging users to buy software. The same’s now true on the Mac. One can only hope someone at Microsoft is paying attention, because a Windows equivalent would be fantastic (and potentially cut down on malware/virus issues if the store was properly curated).

Libin also reckons the experience has cemented his thoughts regarding users gravitating towards the best user experiences, justifying the company’s native-apps approach:

If Evernote’s desktop clients were written in Adobe AIR, I’d be worried right now. The immediate popularity of the Mac App Store, and the iPhone App Store before it, reinforces my belief that in a world of infinite software choice, people gravitate towards the products with the best overall user experience. It’s very hard for something developed in a cross-platform, lowest-common-denominator technology to provide as nice an experience as a similar native app.

As the CEO of a software company, I wish this weren’t true. I’d love to build one version of our App that could work everywhere. Instead, we develop separate native versions for Windows, Mac, Desktop Web, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and (coming soon) Windows Phone 7. We do it because the results are better and, frankly, that’s all-important. We could probably save 70% of our development budget by switching to a single, cross-platform client, but we would probably lose 80% of our users. And we’d be shut out of most app stores and go back to worrying about distribution.

It’s something of a running joke in the tech press how often highly paid and influential analysts update their predictions for iPad sales. TechCrunch’s article by Erick Schonfeld from a couple of days back neatly sums things up:

The iPad sold three times as much as the average tech blogger predictions, and five times as much as the average Wall Street analyst prediction. Think about that the next time you see a prediction for anything in tech. The newer it is, the less anybody knows.

To be fair, Brian Marshall did OK guessing at seven million, but just 1.1 million, Doug Reid of Thomas Weisel and Yair Reiner of Oppenheimer? Really? Even if the iPad hadn’t become a breakout hit and shaken up the industry, it would have sold more than that number to Apple fans alone.

A year ago: Acer dismisses a tablet (PCWorld), arguing that its netbooks and notebooks won’t be affected by the iPad.

Today: Acer is to start selling tablets by summer (Computerworld), and Taiwan sales manager Lu Bing-hsian says:

They are aimed at phasing out netbooks. That’s the direction of the market.

Interesting times in mobile gaming. Although plenty of people continue to dismiss iOS and similar devices going forward, the industry is gradually shifting. The big news today is on MVC, where Capcom Interactive’s president and COO Midori Yuasa had this to say:

The casual gamer that used to play on the PC and the hardcore gamer that used to play on a dedicated gaming portable now plays on their smartphone.

The iPhone and larger smartphone markets are extremely important to Capcom as, like no device before, smartphones have the potential to become a universal game platform.

This is the fight Nintendo’s now in with the 3DS, and it’s very different to battling just another gaming console.

In Why Apple Will Be OK Without Steve Jobs, Leander Kahney bucks the trend and suggests the Cupertino giant will be fine, even if Jobs never returns to the company. He notes that Jobs is hardly alone in dreaming up and refining products (they’re not suddenly ‘discovered’—they come through a process of robust iteration and prototyping), that Tim Cook’s been a fine ‘acting CEO’ before, and that Jobs has turned his personality into Apple’s business processes.

He gets one thing wrong though, stating the following in his conclusion:

Apple will be fine without Jobs, although it won’t be the same. It won’t shine quite as brightly. It’ll be like the Rolling Stones without Mick Jagger.

Apple won’t shine as bright without Jobs, but it won’t be like the Stones minus Jagger, which would be nothing. The only musical analogy I could think of is unfortunate, in that it involves a death (which I surely hope doesn’t happen to Jobs), and it’s Joy Division.

When Ian Curtis left this world, the band suddenly found itself without its charismatic, amazing front-man. No-one really knew the other guys, and everyone in the press predicted disaster. One of the band (Bernard Sumner) got the ‘job’ of taking over, a new recruit (keyboardist Gillian Gilbert) came in to bolster the team, and they set to work. The first album was shaky (although I like it) but within a couple of years they’d put out Blue Monday, the biggest-selling 12″ of them all, and this was followed by critically acclaimed album after critically album.

There’s no reason to think that an Apple without Jobs couldn’t find itself in a similar place, especially if the company finds its own Blue Monday without him.